–

Recommendation as high engagement

MM: As we wrap up our time here, can you share with us some more forward-looking comments or ideas about the use of widgets and some of these other sorts of things that we read about in these little applets or mash-up kind of applications that you see at FaceBook? And how that ties into some of the things that you guys are doing?

RT: Absolutely. We work with a company very closely. A company called iLike. There’re a digital, online music company.

What ended up happening was, they used their FaceBook app to add a little widget into the FaceBook profile that. And a lot of people who already had profiles on iLike… To bring their music over into the FaceBook application. So successful, they were signing up like a half million members a month. It just blew up. It was absolutely unbelievable how successful they were capable of, in bringing new members to their site by just adding a FaceBook extension to their application.

MM: So there I am in my FaceBook profile, and underneath, I’ve got the little interesting factoids about my stuff, and what groups I’m a part of. In that profile, I’ve now added a little visual image of what, as it relates to iLike?

RT: Right. What happens is, you have a series of applications that you can add to your profile. You go to their little list, and you find the iLike application, and you add that to your profile. That gives a little popup — a little window — right there. You can log into your iLike profile, and your iLike profile then sucks in your iLike music, right into your FaceBook profile.

Then you can recommend your music to other FaceBook members. You can recommend FaceBook members to sign up for an iLike profile.

MM: The kind of data that’s moving across there would be like the artist and the song and things like that?

RT: Exactly. It’s really simple. They’re just links to the iLike site.

MM: Right.

RT: They’re basically getting members to distribute links all over the web through the FaceBook application to their content. That’s what’s driving a tremendous amount of their membership building right now. It’s really coming through this tremendous distribution of their content — through the FaceBook application.

What we’re seeing, though — and our idea of the future of social media as a whole is that… We’re getting very close to the saturation point of having a framework that can consume and create and consume profiles from all kinds of different social networks.

The FaceBook application doesn’t just allow you to read into it. It also allows you to read from it, as well.

If you have a FaceBook profile and you have a MySpace profile, and you have an iLike profile and all these other profiles, we believe that the next iteration of this will be a mash-up or an integrator of all of these profiles, into one social media profile. One big profile.

MM: So now I’ve got all of my social media positions integrated almost to a dashboard.

RT: Absolutely. That’s exactly right. A dashboard is exactly how we describe it in our technology meetings.

–